If there are multiple forms of intelligence, as psychologists assert, it stands to reason that there must also be an impressive range of forms of stupidity. Given the embryonic stage of development of this science (to which this book adds a few important milestones) and the dearth of authoritative studies, we should begin with an overview of representative samples.
Backward, slow, ignorant, idiotic, useless, foolish, lug-headed, imbecilic, stupid, witless, cracked, silly, moronic, dippy . . . the vocabulary of stupidity is endless. These semantic riches reflect subtle gradations in meaning, variation in usage, and the effects of social trends.
On the whole, however, the meaning always comes down to the same thing: whatever the variety of epithets and metaphors, the fool is a person who is judged to be of reduced intelligence and limited mental scope. Thus, stupidity is always defined invidiously, as a relative concept. A person is not inherently stupid (if everyone was stupid, nobody would notice it). Put another way, stupidity is measured from a fixed point established by a person who considers himself superior.
Also known as rednecks or hillbillies, rubes are stupid, cruel, racist, and selfish. At least that’s how the French satirist Cabu, who immortalized their traits in his comic strips, depicted them. They dominate the ranks of the voters who elect populist parties, because they’re stupid; which is to say they’re incapable of political probity, and they rely on short-term logic and sweeping generalizations. Their thinking is categorical—everything is black or white, with no nuance. They’re stubborn and obtuse, and rational arguments hold no sway with them: they won’t ever back down from their opinions. They think what they think, period.
They’re cruel because, lacking any empathy, they seek out scapegoats and lash out at innocent victims like Arabs, blacks, and migrants in general.
They’re selfish because only one thing matters to them: their well-being and comfort; their pocketbook.
But do these rubes conform to an actual psychological profile? If this were the case it would be necessary to demonstrate an organic relationship between stupidity (in the sense of a low level of intellect) and cruelty (defined as selfishness combined with contempt for others).
And yet, the link between these two qualities is only conjectural: a person can be stupid and kind (consider the “village idiot”), just as a person can be intelligent and cruel. Is that not the case of the caricaturists Cabu and Jean-Marc Reiser, who worked for a magazine called Hara-Kiri, whose motto was “stupid and nasty”? Those men were not truly stupid (even if the systematic use of caricature and cliché ultimately produces a deadening effect on the wit). Nasty: that they often were.
“They’re all morons!” This phrase is uttered, usually rather loudly, by someone sitting on a barstool. But who is this “they”? Politicians, the voters who elect them, bureaucrats, incompetents, and by extension, pretty much everybody—since the phrase does not carry a lot of nuance.
This absence of discernment in analysis, this arrogance that places itself above the common run of humanity to levy judgment on the rest of the world: these are almost foolproof signs that you’re dealing with a true idiot. “The peculiar nature of error is that it does not recognize itself,” Descartes observed. This is especially true of stupidity. Obviously, a fool cannot recognize himself. On the contrary, he himself constitutes a kind of lightning rod of folly. Wherever you happen to be, if you hear someone declare “They’re all morons!” you can be sure that there’s a moron in the vicinity.
“Computers are totally stupid.”1 This assertion doesn’t come from just anyone. Gérard Berry teaches computer science at the Collège de France. A specialist in artificial intelligence, he does not hesitate to challenge the speculations (ill-informed) on the capacity of machines to surpass human intelligence.
Certainly, artificial intelligence has made significant progress in the last sixty years. And certainly, machines can recognize images, translate texts, and produce medical diagnoses. In 2016, the Deepmind computer program AlphaGo succeeded in defeating one of the world’s best players of Go, the Japanese game of strategy. While this performance was impressive, we should not overlook the fact that AlphaGo knows how to do only one thing: to play the game of Go. The same was true of the Deep Blue program that beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1996, more than twenty years ago. All that these so-called intelligent machines do is develop an extremely specialized competence, which is taught to them by their human master. Speculations on the autonomy of machines that can “learn on their own” are nothing but myths. Machines don’t know how to transfer skills acquired from one domain into another; whereas one of the basic mechanisms of human intelligence is analogical transfer. The strength of computers is the power of their memories to retain the work they’ve done, and their electrifying capacity for calculation.
“Learning machines” that work on the principle of “deep learning” (the new generation of artificial intelligence) are not intelligent, because they don’t understand what they’re doing. All that Google’s automatic translation program does, for instance, is learn how to use a word in a given context (drawing on an immense reservoir of examples); but it remains perfectly “stupid” in the process. In no case does it understand the meaning of the words it uses.
This is why Gérard Berry feels justified in saying that, at root, “the computer is completely stupid.”
Collective intelligence designates a form of group intelligence, as displayed by ants, or neurons, for example. Each element in isolation is not capable of much; but as a group can produce great feats. By the magic of self-organization, ants are able to build hallways, bridal chambers, pantries, hatcheries, and ventilation systems in their anthills. Some of them practice agriculture (growing mushrooms), animal husbandry (raising aphids), etc.
Even though its functioning remains unexplained, collective intelligence has become a respected model in a very short time, resting on the simple idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Collective decision making and cocreation are better than individual decisions.
Nonetheless, it sometimes happens that the many make a worse decision than the individual. Collective intelligence has its counterpart: collective stupidity. In groups, our capacity for good judgment can be severely reduced. In his studies on group norms, the psychologist Solomon Asch long ago addressed many well-known instances of this phenomenon. To name one: if a majority of people embraces a manifestly false and idiotic theory, others will go along with it merely because of the power of conformity. To name another instance: the false virtues of brainstorming. Take a group of ten people and make them work together for half an hour on a project (like tourism slogans to promote a town, for example). At the same time, set another group to work in which each member works separately on the task. Gather up their reports: the proposals of the second group are much richer and more plentiful than the proposals of the first group. Put another way, sometimes the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
It would be beside the point to conduct large-scale psychological experiments to investigate collective folly. Everything that could be proven in the lab is experienced every day in offices, where collective efforts in meetings produce so many stupid ideas that it’s hard not to think that one foolish person had dreamed them all up on his own.
What could be more gullible than a child? You can make a kid believe almost anything: that there’s an old guy with a white beard somewhere up in the sky who travels in a flying sled pulled by reindeer, delivering gifts to good children; or that a little fairy hunts under pillows for baby teeth, which she replaces with a quarter when she finds one. . . .
Gullibility is a form of stupidity that is altogether appropriate to childhood. That, in any case, is what the psychologist Jean Piaget thought. The philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl thought that “primitive peoples” were very credulous, too, because of their animist beliefs in “forest spirits” endowed with magical powers, which proved, he thought, that the “savages,” like children, had not attained the age of reason.
But with the advance of scientific research, it has become necessary to concede that children were not as naïve as people thought: they accept that reindeer can fly, but only in a parallel universe that does not obey the laws that apply down here, where they know very well that reindeer can’t fly. We ourselves, rational adults, are prepared to believe in the existence of particles that exhibit strange behaviors (the ubiquitous miracle of long-distance communication) without any confirmation from experts. Some of these scientists are people of faith, some of them even believe in the Resurrection of Christ.
These realizations have led psychologists and sociologists to take another look at what it means to be gullible. Gullibility can no longer be seen to reflect a lack of logic (in other words, infantile stupidity). Believing in things that appear to be unbelievable is related to a system of reference, rather than to naïveté or to an absence of discernment.
At the end of his life, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl admitted that he had been mistaken about the mentality of the “primitives.” It’s to his credit that he acknowledged his error, a pretty rare occurrence in the world of philosophers.
When, at the end of the nineteenth century, Jules Ferry made primary education obligatory in France, it appeared that certain students were incapable of absorbing routine instruction. Two psychologists, Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon, were asked to create an intelligence test in order to identify such children so that they could receive an adapted education. This test formed the basis of what would later become the famous “IQ”—the Intelligence Quotient.
By convention, the average IQ of a population is 100 percent. The emergence of the IQ tests led to the definition of mental deficiency and its subtypes: from “borderline deficiency,” among those whose IQ was less than 80 (and higher than 65); to “moderate deficiency,” applying to those who scored between 50 and 65; to “profound deficiency” (members of this category were once deemed “imbeciles”), with an IQ of 20 to 34. Still further below, with an IQ inferior to 20, are the “profoundly backward” (formerly classified as “idiots”).
Today, the words “retarded” and “impaired” are out of favor in psychology; they have been replaced by euphemisms. We speak of “learning disabilities” and we avoid the expressions “handicapped” and “differently abled.” In the same way, we no longer speak of “geniuses” or “gifted” children; we speak of “precocious children” or of children with “high potential.” This doesn’t keep anyone, in practice, from using tests to classify children according to their degree of mental disability, so they can be guided to specialized methods of instruction.
At the dawn of psychiatry, the terms “imbecility” and “idiocy” were used to describe people who displayed a very low level of intellect, who could not read, write, and in certain cases, speak. Philippe Pinel, the French physician who is sometimes called the “father of modern psychiatry,” considered Victor de l’Aveyron (better known as the “wild boy of Aveyron”) to be an “idiot.” Today the boy would be classified as autistic. In the words of the psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Esquirol, “The idiot is an individual who knows nothing, is capable of nothing, and wants nothing. Every idiot embodies, more or less, the acme of incapacity.”
Dr. Paul Sollier, in his 1891 book Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile: Essai de Psychologie Morbide [The Psychology of the Idiot and the Imbecile: An Essay on Psychological Morbidity], devoted one chapter to “idiots and imbeciles.” Apologizing for the tardy progress of French psychology, as compared to English and American achievement in the science, he noted that there was no consensus on the right way to define idiocy or imbecility: some use intelligence as the evaluative factor, others rely on language (the inability to speak correctly); still others apply moral considerations (a lack of self-control).
Over time, psychologists would abandon the concept of the “idiot.” The only remnant of this notion that still pops up on occasion is the term “idiot savant,” though even there, the term “savant syndrome” is preferred. The profile, which incorporates certain cases of autism and of the developmental disorder known as Williams syndrome, is marked by deficits in language or in general intelligence, and also by unusual difficulties with mathematics, drawing, and music.
For centuries, the village idiot was the archetype of a intellectually disabled person, the fool, the simpleton. Not too long ago, every village had its “crackpot” (fada is the expression used in the south of France), who would be hired for menial tasks. This oaf was regarded as pleasant and harmless, always smiling and happy, laughing over nothing. He wasn’t considered dangerous. In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Dopey, with his beatific smile, big eyes, and crooked cap, illustrates the type.
“Loon” is a cute way to talk about fools, not angry fools, but the dreamy kind caught up in a fantasy world. The loon is a step away from the weirdo—that is to say, a loon who does bizarre or excessive things. And the weirdo is not far removed from the freak, who, according to the rigorous National Center for Textual and Lexical Resources, is “generally a fantasist who displays eccentric behavior.” In current French usage, the expression “freak out” can mean horse around, show off, or act goofy; and it also approximates the French expression “faire le zouave”: to act like a clown. In English, “get your freak on” recently entered the Oxford English Dictionary, meaning, roughly, to engage in uninhibited sexual behavior, or to dance like a maniac.